


The Sinners and the Saints

by inkdust



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Blasphemy, Bucky Barnes Feels, Character Study, Established Relationship, Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts, Healing, I feel like that should be tagged twice, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-everything, canon is irrelevant, more or less, this fic brought to you by Hamilton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 01:15:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8947408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkdust/pseuds/inkdust
Summary: Every time Steve kisses him feels like a miracle.
[what peace might look like, after everything]





	

Every time Steve kisses him feels like a miracle.

It’s not, though. Steve just breathing is a miracle. Steve’s heart beating is a miracle. Anything more should send Bucky to his knees.

So he falls to his knees, over and over. On the living room floor; at the side of the bed. Against the front door, Steve’s hands in his hair, his own hands shaking as he fumbles with the singed blue suit.

He doesn’t deserve it.

He doesn’t deserve any of this, not Bucky Barnes from Brooklyn and not Bucky now, whoever he chooses to be.

But it doesn’t make any difference.

Steve is there, kissing the breath from his lungs, gasping Bucky’s name into his ear. Steve’s hands touch him like a holy thing, wake him from nightmares to count the beads of sweat on his body. Bucky kisses his fingertips, his wrists, the soft inside of his thigh, like he could find the right words hidden beneath Steve’s skin. If they were anywhere, he would find them there.

But there are no words for this, beyond the three, and those Bucky whispers, moans, sobs in every language his body knows.

He doesn’t deserve any of this. But that doesn’t change a damn thing.

So he wakes up and wakes up and wakes up, and there’s still something about waking. Pressing his hand against the space between his fifth and sixth ribs and knowing that the heartbeat under his fingers hasn’t stopped. Not once.

Some days that feels like a miracle too.

-

Some days he turns the pages of Steve’s sketchbook, tracing the lines of his own face until his fingers leave a gray streak across his forehead. A mark of who he was, who he is, who he might be. Steve draws him both ways, before and after, and some days Bucky wants to ask why he draws the after ones, but he knows what Steve would say. And the sun is warm on his shoulders as Steve’s pencil scratches softly over the paper.

It’s quiet here, gentle in a way he doesn’t remember from before. Another way his world has changed. He keeps a list of them in his mind, arbitrary and incomplete, which is more or less the same as his mind. It’s comforting, that list. It demands nothing from him, nothing he’s supposed to see or do or love or hate. He smiles when Steve still talks about catching up, because they’re already here.

_Here_ , he whispers as he pulls Steve to him, and the word is a prayer.

-

On the best days, he wakes slowly.

It took time to relearn, how to bite back that instant animal twitch, and most days he’s still just pretending. But on the rarest mornings, awareness slips in gently, water droplets collecting one by one until his eyes flutter open to the touch of Steve’s fingers. Stroking his hair, trailing down his spine, languid and lazy and he is powerless under those fingers.

Memories flicker in his mind like candles against stained glass, but their bodies remember each other. Their pieces fit, somehow, after everything their bodies have been. And Bucky—mind, body, and soul—could never give it up.

-

On the best days, the very best days, he is fiercely, desperately happy.

-

Other days he still wonders how they’re both real. His brain will hitch on something like the sound of Steve’s feet on the kitchen tile or the sight of their cast-off jeans tangled together, and for a moment time blurs.

But they’re here.

The hollow shaky part of him still can’t shed the feeling that he’s getting away with something. That one day they’ll ask him to give it up, hand it over, sign here, you’re done. Part of him is still waiting for penance.

Because it isn’t fair, what he’s got. What he’s given. It’s a simple truth. But he wakes to sunlight and Steve’s steady breath—he wakes up over and over until he has to know fair’s got nothing to do with it.

So he closes his eyes and reaches blindly for the warmth, reaches and takes because goddamn if he’s going to let it go.

_Mine_ , he breathes, teeth grazing skin. Harder, sharper. _Mine._

And Steve pulls him closer—always closer, as if Bucky will ever have enough. As if every day he gets isn’t a fucking miracle.

But he’s here, every day, heart beating; breathless with the immensity of what he’s been given. So he falls to his knees, and he takes.

There are only three words for this.

 

**Author's Note:**

> _Love doesn't discriminate between the sinners and the saints_   
>  _it takes and it takes and it takes_
> 
> I feel like I cheated on my WIPs, but the Bucky feelings.
> 
> l0g0phile gets a virtual fruit basket of thank yous for patiently enduring my fussing and griping over every single one of these words <3


End file.
